One of the distinctive characters of demons, was their infectious stink, which exhaled from all portions of the body. This odor attributed to the Devil was an hallucination to the sense of smell which entered, like those of the genesic sense, into all the complex hallucinations of Demonomania.
Examples of men cohabiting with demons, are cited by many authors of the Middle Ages. Gregory of Tours has left us the record of Eparchius, Bishop of Auvergne, who cohabited with succubi.
Jerome Cardan, physician and Italian mathematician, tells of a priest who cohabited for over fifty years, with a demon disguised as a woman.
Pic de Mirandolle, relates how another priest had commerce for over forty years with a beautiful succubus, whom he called Hermione. Bodin recounts the story of Edeline, the Prior of a religious community in Sorbonne. An adversary of Demonomaniacal doctrines, Edeline was accused by the theologians of defending demons. Before the Tribunal the Prior declared that he had been visited by Satan, in the form of a black ram, and had prostituted his body to an incubus, and only obeyed his master in preaching that sorcery was a chimerical invention. “Although the proof furnished by the registers of the Tribunal of Poitiers,” remarks Calmeil, “leaves no doubt as to the alienation of the intellectual faculties at the moment of his trial, Edeline was none the less condemned to perpetual seclusion from the world.”
As another striking example of hallucination, bearing upon this question of incubism, Guibert de Nogent tells of a monk, “who was sick, and retained the services of a Jew doctor. In exchange for health, the aforesaid physician, demanded a sacrifice. ‘What sacrifice?’ asked the monk. ‘The sacrifice of that which is the most precious to men,’ answered the Jew. ‘What may that be?’ inquired the monk. And the demon, for it was the Devil disguised as a doctor, had the audacity to explain. ‘Oh curses! Oh shame! to require such a thing of a priest’—but the victim, nevertheless, did what was asked. It was the denial of Christ and the true faith.”
Like psycho-sensorial hallucinations of the other senses, that of the genesic sense may assume the erotic type of disease, and is due undoubtedly, in some men, to a repletion of the spermatic vesicules. It is this that Saint Andre, physician in ordinary to Louis XIV., gives as an explanation of incubism. “The incubus,”[71] says this writer, “a chimera that had for its foundation only a dream, an over excited imagination, too often a longing after women; artifice had no less a part in the creation of the incubus,—a woman, a girl, only a devotee in name, already long before debauched, but desiring to appear virtuous to hide her crime, passes off the offenses of some lover as the act of a demon; this is the ordinary explanation. In this artifice the woman is often aided by the suggestions of the man—a man who has heard succubi speaking to him in his sleep, usually sees most beautiful women in his dreams, which, under such circumstances, are often erotic.”
It is certain that an ardent imagination and exaggerated sexual appetite have played a leading role in the history of incubi, but, meantime, there may be exceptions.
Nicholas Remy, Inquisitor of Lorraine, has given a description of impurities committed between demons and sorcerers, according to the testimony given by those possessed.[72] Fortunately, he has only given a Latin version of what they have told him. He states: “Hic igitur, sive vir incubet, sive succubet fœmina, liberum in utroque naturæ debet esse officium, nihilque omnino intercedere quod id vel minimum moretur atque impediat, si pudor, metus, horror, sensusque, aliquis acrior ingruit; il icet ad irritum redeunt omnia e lumbis affœaque prorsus sit natura.”
Then comes the sentence of the four girls of Vosges, according to the confessions, who were named Nanette, Claudine, Nicola, and Didace, and of whom Nicholas Remy, fortunately for the masses of the profession, only speaks in Latin, lest modesty be shocked at the narration. “Alexia Drigæa recensuit doémoni suo pœnem, cum surrigebat tentum semper extitisse quanti essent subices focarii, quos tum forte præsentes digito demonstrabat; scroto ac coleis nullis inde pendentibus, etc.” (We forbear from further quotation and for fuller particulars refer the reader to the original.)
Were these girls attacked by a malady, a complex hallucination of the senses that led them to firmly believe they were possessed or owned by a supernatural being who obliged them to abdicate their free will in his favor? Were they only, after all, prostitutes suffering from nymphomania? We can only insist that prostitution, or a low standard of morality, enters largely into the history of those possessed by incubi.